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I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies.

  - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality.  
  - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainly used Node.js.
  - Performance (reads and writes) was impressive.  
  - Setting up a highly available cluster with sharding was incredibly easy with a few clicks and types in the aforementioned web U/I.
  - Their web U/I was the best to ship with a database at the time.
I still wear my RethinkDB shirt around, and it was a pleasure meeting one of the founders Michael Glukhovsky in San Francisco when they were still moving and grooving.

The best technology and product doesn't always win.



Performance for my workload (writes/reads for a relatively small number of large documents) was absolutely atrocious.

To the point that retrieving data based on a secondary index (of like 10000 documents) took like 5s.

Then inserting the same documents took a significant (don’t remember the exact magnitude) amount of time as well.

By comparison mysql does the same stuff in 50ms (or less).

Everything around RethinkDB was fantastic, but I just couldn’t justify that since the basic operation was so terrible.


But, but...the data structures were all lock-free! Who cares if throughput sucked?


Yeah, let me just spin up a few hundred more servers. That’ll take care of the problem right quick!


RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB

MongoDB is a weird one because what they had didn't even meet the most basic requirements of "a database", that you could store something in it and reliably get it back out. But they somehow converted their joke of a product into enough money to buy WiredTiger, rebrand its product as theirs, and profit. It's the ultimate expression of "fake it 'til you make it" and they did it by giving away stickers at conferences!

The best technology and product doesn't always win.

Once you realise what we do is not engineering, it's fashion, it will all make sense.


Wiretiger replaced the mmap storage engine. It was more of a library than a server.


Has MongoDB "made it" now or are they still "faking it"? Under what conditions is data lost?


Honestly, as the person who is ending up having to do the RethinkDB migration... it's the lack of an AWS hosted solution that killed it for us. Even the import is a great experience and moving to MongoDB wasn't too bad (after a bit of cleanup)


Interesting, RethinkDB was really easy to setup. Three EC2 instances (cluster), install their apt repo, and install. There were a few config options[1], but really minimal and clean.

[1] https://rethinkdb.com/docs/config-file/


The setup process isn't the reason people want to use hosted services, the maintenance is.


Yeah, that's what we ran too, but there's a heavy internal push to use managed services.


I liked the RethinkDB API better too. Seemed more intuitive and you could do something like joins in it too.


I loved the API. It made it very clear and easy to think about how my data is being accessed, how my indexes are used etc. I miss working with rethinkdb :(




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